English language- movie review

My Name is Khan broke global box office records as the largest grossing

Bollywood movie worldwide in its opening weekend, including in the United
States, Britain, Australia, and the Middle East, while in Mumbai itself, the film
opened successfully despite advance opposition from chauvinist politicians who
objected to its cosmopolitan message. The film also made a critical splash
internationally, receiving rave reviews from Mumbai to New York.

The movie’s critical and commercial success can be explained in part by its
fusionist approach, its merging of mainstream Hollywood and Bollywood
themes and techniques. Its two main characters, Rizvan Khan (Shah Rukh
Khan) and Mandira (Kajol), and its director Karan Johar are all up-and-
coming Bollywood stars. The film is shot on location in India and the US (it
contains some magnificent cinematography), and is distributed by the Fox
International studio group. The global appeal of My Name is Khan is also no
doubt due to the fact that it deals with the themes of terrorism and the West’s war
upon it, tracing the devastating impact of 9/11 on a Muslim man (and his family)
living in America.

But Khan is no ordinary Muslim. He has Asperger’s Syndrome, which, rather than
acting as an affliction, allows him to break convention, see through and overcome
intolerance, and speak truth to power. Khan grows up in Mumbai under the loving
and watchful eye of his mother, following his brother to San Francisco after she
dies. He spends much of the first half of the film clumsily but successfully wooing
Mandira, an American-born Hindu woman with a young son. Following the 9/11
attack and the subsequent increase in anti-Muslim prejudice, a family tragedy
impels him to journey across the United States in search of the president so that
he may tell him ‘My name is Khan and I am not a terrorist’.

The opening scene is among the most powerful of the film. It traces the
painful progression of Khan through a post-9/11 American airport full of
fearful and paranoid people. He is a Muslim man wearing a backpack and
acting in a visibly nervous and socially awkward way, never making eye
contact (symptoms of Asperger’s rather than evidence of guilty
wrongdoing), and draws stares and suspicion from his fellow
passengers. Finally, airport security guards lead him away for a full body and
baggage search but when they find nothing incriminating, Khan tells them of his
innocence and how he plans to meet the president. The security guard laughs
and asks Khan to ‘Say howdy’ to the president from him too. Noting the guard’s
name badge, Khan writes in his notebook that ‘John Marshall’ wishes to pass his
regards to George W Bush. John Marshall, of course, was also the name of the
greatest Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in US history.

Unfortunately, the film fails to live up to the promise of this opening. While
the love story is moving and there are some emotionally powerful scenes,
the film’s central message is finally banal. As a boy, Khan learns from his
mother that the fighting between Hindu and Muslim is pointless and wrong
since there are only two kinds of people in the world, ‘good’ people and
‘bad’ people. The only result of hatred and intolerance is, we learn, many
mothers’ tears. Khan’s marriage to a Hindu woman demonstrates his own inability
to hate, his own ‘goodness’. Yet, rather than the message being a means to
overcome divisions caused by identity politics, the tolerance the film preaches is a
means of reinforcing an acceptance of separate identities. The post-9/11
discrimination Muslims face forces them to hide the outward symbols of their
ethnic and religious identities. Khan’s determination to overcome this prejudice
encourages other Muslims to reclaim these symbols again, pointedly
demonstrated by Khan’s sister-in-law Haseena (Sonya Jeehan) who re-embraces
her hijab as a part of her denied self.

In post-9/11 America, Khan remembers his mother’s teaching well. So,

rather than a serious and intelligent study of the political impact of the 9/11
attacks on American Muslims, the film unfortunately descends into a
simplistic morality tale. While the landscapes of Khan’s American travels are
spectacular, the people he meets are grotesque caricatures. White America is
unrelentingly ‘bad’, racist, and violent, while black America is depicted as ‘good’ in
the soulful victims of a hurricane ‘Mama Jenny’ (Jennifer Echols) and her son
‘Crazy Hair’ Joel (Adrian Kali Turner).

The most grotesque caricatures come, however, in the person of the US

presidents. George W Bush and his followers represent the hate and fear that
must be overcome by dark-skinned people in the US and worldwide. Obama
represents a new dawn, the possibilities of love, hope, and peace: not just in his
politics but in the colour of his skin, he offers something new, something ‘good’. It
bears pointing out that the black-and-white morality of the film is a mirror image of
the War on Terror itself, with Bush’s position that ‘You are either with us or against
us’ flipped; the good guys are differently cast but no political complexity is added
—indeed, it is simplified further.

It is perhaps refreshing to see a depiction of black America redeeming the sins of

white America and interesting to have a portrait of post-9/11 politics as seen
through Muslim eyes. In one of the best scenes, Khan is refused entry to a charity
dinner at which the president is speaking, despite having the £500 entrance fee,
since he is not a Christian. He instructs the administrator to keep his entrance fee
‘for all the non-Christians in Africa’. The film admirably punctures hypocrisy but
ultimately it tries to do too much, to be too many things, to be too worthy, and to
solve the world’s problems.

The central and most interesting issue the film sets out to deal with—how Muslims
experience and respond to life in post-9/11 America—becomes obscured and
caricatured and finally obliterated so that what is left is a kind of
postcolonial Forrest Gump. Is life really just a box of chocolates?